We must join together to strike out cancer

Cancer is a cruel disease. A patient’s battle in hopes of defeating it is often a long one. The process is painful, demoralizing and heartbreaking for everyone involved.

Jerry Remy, the former second baseman and longtime color commentator for the Boston Red Sox, has been down this road five times.

We found out last week that he now begins the fight for the sixth time in about a decade. Lung cancer. What a nightmare.

Remy is courageous. “I have two choices: quit or fight. I’m going to fight,” he told the Herald of his sixth cancer diagnosis. “Because I reach so many people through television, if I can give them some hope, then that’s what I’m going to do.

“If you help one person, one family then you’ve helped somebody,” he added.

If anybody can give others struggling with cancer hope, it’s Jerry Remy. To have fought off the vicious disease five times is remarkable. It is impossible to imagine the physical and mental strength he would have had to muster to achieve that feat.

We hope and pray he can do it again.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, “In 2015, the latest year for which incidence data are available, 218,527 new cases of Lung and Bronchus cancer were reported, and 153,718 people died of Lung and Bronchus cancer in the United States. For every 100,000 people, 58 new Lung and Bronchus cancer cases were reported and 41 died of cancer.”

Cancer is the second leading cause of death in the United States, behind only heart disease. One in every four deaths in the U.S. is from cancer.

Thankfully, there are new paths to victory. According to the Lung Cancer Society of America, “Treatment options for lung cancer patients are rapidly improving. In the last two years, more treatments have been approved by the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the treatment of lung cancer than had been approved in the prior ten years.”

Real progress is being made in treating the disease. According to the American Society of Clinical Oncology, “the rate of cancer death has been decreasing — It has dropped 23 percent between 1991 and 2012, and people are living longer with cancer than ever before. Approximately 64 percent of US patients diagnosed with cancer in 2005 have lived 10 years or more beyond diagnosis, up from 35 percent for those diagnosed in 1975.”

Cancer researchers can always use more federal funds, such as the 21st Century Cures Act, which Congress passed in December 2016 authorizing $1.8 billion in funding for the “Beau Biden Cancer Moonshot“over seven years.

Let’s hope our divided political class can continue to come together on the issue of cancer. Virtually everyone knows someone who has been affected by the disease.

Shortly after his latest diagnosis, Remy tweeted, “Thank you for all of your support. This has hit me hard but I have never quit and will not now. I have complete trust in my team at Mass General.”

Let’s keep supporting each other in the battle against cancer. Whether it’s through acts of goodwill, private charity or public funding, we can and must extinguish this scourge.

Earlier this year, former Vice President Joe Biden said, “I see the day … when you take your child or your grandchild for the school physical, they’ll be vaccinated against certain cancers, like they can now be vaccinated against HPV. I see the day when they’ll be able to identify, through markers in the blood, cancers that haven’t even been developed yet.”

Let’s make that day soon. Sometime in the future, hopefully, the oncology department in the hospital will be a very small one and fatal cancer a distant memory.